Button, Button Who has the Button???

I love the addition of button to my cards but I never seem to have one in the right color and they can be a bit bulky for mailing. Hopefully I can help you with always having a button for your projects – just follow along with my tutorial. If the steps don’t make sense to you, feel free to drop me a line and I’ll try to explain it a bit better.

Step 1

Assemble all of your supplies

There are several companies that have an actual button die but if you don’t have one, don’t let that stop you. Gather your punches and other dies, I’ll show you have you can take any shape and make it into a button. Along with the button shapes you need a VersaMark ink pad, a tiny hole paper punch or a paper piercing tool, and clear embossing powder (I like to use the fine granule powder but I think any type will work fine). I forgot to show it here but you’ll also need some adhesive and I love to use a fine-tipped tweezers for holding on to the small shapes. You will also need a heat embossing gun.

Step 2

Gather your papers. I like to have two shapes for each button; a patterned paper and a coordinating color of cardstock.

Step3

Punch or Die Cut your shapes. I’ll be feature the stars going forward – as you can see on the left is the cardstock and to the right of it the patterned paper. So you can see the patterned paper I chose for my card and I wanted buttons that would coordinate well. I took the designer paper and used the inner parts of the stars – by using the same designer paper to make the buttons as the card base, the buttons will always match. When choosing what parts of the designer paper to use, my suggestion is to use a small pattern to make your buttons. Some of my favorite patterns are small polka-dotted papers and small checked papers but experiment – you never know what wonderful buttons you will be able to create!

Step 4

Grab your adhesive, I like to use a glue pen. Glue the patterned paper to the cardstock – if you are using button dies, carefully align the holes.

Step 5

So here’s how you can take any shape and make it into a button. The middle row shows a small punched circle – below it you can see the same shape with two holes made using a tiny hole punch and if you don’t have a tiny hole punch you can use paper-piercer to make the holes. I also punched holes to the assembled stars. Now you could use them just like this but I like the look of my finished buttons better.

Step 6

Please don’t look to closely at my grungy VersaMark pad but it works just fine. Place the top-side of your button (the patterned paper side) face down on to the VersaMark pad and ink it up.

Step 7

Place the inked shape into the clear embossing powder.

Step 8

Heat/melt the embossing powder with your embossing gun.

Step 9

Sorry this photo doesn’t show up very well but it is trying to show you the melted powder.

Step 10

While the embossing powder is still hot/melted – dip it back into your embossing powder.

Step 11

Embossing powder ready to be heat set for a second time.

Step 12

This time you can see a bit better the heated/melted embossing powder.

Step 13

While still melted, dip into the embossing powder for a third time.

Step 14

Embossing powder to be melted one last time.

Step 15

The finished button, see the added dimension the embossing powder adds? If your holes fill in with melted embossing powder – just use your paper-piercer while it is still warm to make nice clean button holes. I find three coats of embossing powder is just fine but if you feel it could use another coat go for it – more than four coats, the embossing powder runs out of room to set on your shape.

Step 16

So here you can see my finished buttons. I did up some little butterflies so you could see the possibilities using this technique. These buttons I made for the tutorial have more of a masculine feel to them but you can do the same with some pastel papers for those girly cards.

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11 thoughts on “Button, Button Who has the Button???”

This is an AWESOME project, and I also want to thank you for sharing the tutorial. They’re always so helpful, and this one is AMAZING! Thanks. I appreciate you sharing this with us in our challenge this week and hope you will stop by again soon.
Karen
Word Art Wednesday

P.S. I have a cool tutorial being shared tomorrow morning on my personal blog, and I hope that you will stop by to take a peek (www.karen-mycuprunnethover.blogspot.com). Also, can you please email me (address on WAW blog) and give me your mailing address. I have something I’d like to share with you for playing along with us at Word Art Wednesday!

Love your card! The colors are so bright and cheery! And the embossed buttons are fabulous! That image is brilliant and you colored it beautifully! Thank you so much for joining us at the Simon Says Wednesday Challenge Blog!

I am just wondering how much powder one button “uses” …I mean if after all these buttons turn out to be outrageously expensive because of the use of so much embossing powder [when you are crafting with a low budget all this kind of things matter 😦 ]

A little bit about me…

I LOVE making cards. For me, making greeting cards is a cheap (relatively) form of therapy.
My hubby is one of the most wonderful, caring men in this world. We have two children that are married and they have each blessed us with two grandsons.
Sunday is usually the day we get together as a family and sit down for a meal. The noise levels at time reads pretty high on the decibel meter but I wouldn't change it for anything in this world.
I am a huge sports fan; especially the Minnesota Twins and the Minnesota Vikings. I haven't had much to cheer about lately but one of these years but that's okay as I enjoy just watching the games.
I watch entirely too much television - I enjoy Project Runway, Top Chef, American Idol, NCIS, Castle, Suits, the list goes on - all I can say is thank goodness for DVR!
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